A new blog is a terrifying thing. All the potential, but with any stroke of ink-- or click of the key, to be more appropriate-- the endless possibilities are narrowed down. The tabula raisa is no longer raisa.
I've been wrestling with how to start this, what angle I want to take, and for whom I'm even writing. The blog is first and foremost for myself, but there has to be purpose rather than just self-rants. That purpose shapes direction, and direction shapes the purpose. What I want to do is to write about the dangerous sentiment of faith, but for me that is so entwined in other elements (the Bible, the Middle East, cheeseburgers, Jesus, shrimp, sexuality, loss, Buddha, burqas, astronomy, C. S. Lewis, my job) that it is almost like writing about life itself. I suspect that's the way faith should be, though, so I'm not overly troubled with the notion.
Then the question becomes whether I'm using it to be a bookmark of my own study, or just for random thoughts I want to blather about. It will probably contain both, as I never seem able to be completely on topic, nor do I seem to do well if I flounder without a direction. Am I writing as if my audience has some sort of religion or as if it doesn't? Because the language differs for each, the amount of explanation or even the elements I explain, all of that requires particular choice. I say I want to write for myself, but I don't want something so narcissistic that nobody finds any interest in reading it. On the other hand, it might be presumptive to think anyone really cares about reading it. As ever, I'll strive for middle ground, and often fall off into the dark, deep abyss of redundant explanations. If nobody reads it, though, I won't get any reprimands.
The blog is called Buoyant Faith because once a leader in my church asked the congregation to pick one word to describe faith (or was it Jesus?), and I picked buoyant. Nobody else really seemed to appreciate my choice quite the way I did, and I was bemused. Isn't that the very nature of what faith should be for us, should help us be? We are adrift in a sea of conflict and chaos, emotions good and bad, ethical challenges and moral challenges and financial challenges coming at us from all sides. It's easy to drown. Our faith, therefore, should be buoyant.
That's what I want to focus on, more than anything: the faith that lifts me up. My conversations will likely be gritty and raw, sometimes I might even offend; I'm not polishing it, what you see is what you get. I won't be daily, more likely weekly. Some weeks, it's hard enough to get a minute to breathe, so if I'm inconsistent I won't hate myself. This is my manifesto. Day one. In the beginning, the blankness was divided from the ink, and that was the end of the first day.
